The Education Bureau of Taichung City publishes an annual competency-based lesson planning manual, and my work got accepted with the other fifteen model lesson plans.
Since the implementation of the new national curriculum guidelines
in 2019, how to translate the ideas of principles into feasible and practical
lesson plans that suit the needs of in-service teachers has been the number one
priority of all advisory teams all over the country.
Though there have been many government-funded workshops to promote
the new guidelines, many teachers remain unaware of competency-based teaching's
core values. For example, we Taichung Junior High English Advisory Team had a
lesson plan selection last semester. We got only four works, with none of them
fully in line with competency-based standards.
So what exactly is competency-based teaching? Well, I boiled it
down into three key factors:
1. Real-life Scenarios
Mechanical drills and rote memorization do help with students'
grades on standardized written tests. However, they are only learning about
the facts of the language. They don't know how to apply what
they learn into a real situation, not to mention lots of them become less and
less motivated.
As a teacher, we want to create a more authentic context for our
students to use English. I had my students rewrite the original recipe for
making a milkshake, complete with a simple explanatory video in English to
practice their speaking skills.
2. Collaborative Tasks
We teachers are so used to lecturing throughout the whole class.
All students have to do is sit there quietly and copy what we write on the
blackboard.
To fix this, we can devise activities that require students'
teamwork. Then, we put them into several groups to work together and complete
the assigned tasks. These tasks are not separate. They are connected, with one
facilitates the next one. I'd like to call it Backward Design.
3. End Products
At the end of the class, what will my students DO with the
language so that they can also orally present it?
Take this lesson plan for example, my students had to come with a
mind map to summarize the passage, rewrite the step-by-step recipe, and each
group then was able to record a video in English. How did they know what to say
for their videos? Well, these tasks served as scaffolding to guide them towards
the end product.
Of course, I'm not that naive to believe this competency-based
approach will replace the good old grammar-translation. After all, Taiwan is
still pretty test-driven, and teachers have to make sure their students can do
well on the entrance exam. However, we want our students to be able to have fun
learning English because they can use it outside of the textbook setting. With
this manual, I hope some English teachers can be inspired and give it a try in
their class, too.
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